Hey baby, you've been on my mind tonight

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

29/05/88 : Out Of Order - Rod Stewart


Our twelfth visit with Rod - there really is no avoiding him! And if I've learned one thing about Rod over the years is that sometimes he surprises you - and sometimes he doesn't...

Hmmm - the surprise here is that there's not really anything that surprising about this. It's not terrible but it's not that great either - it's like average 70s Rod updated with an 80s sound. I almost liked "Forever Young" and "Crazy About Her" and he didn't ruin "Try A Little Tenderness" as much as I was expecting (although it did bring home how little there is to that track) - but all in all, it was pretty forgettable.

We're at #11 in the charts with a new entry with this being as high as he got, so he was pretty lucky to get this visit. The top five this week were Nite Flite (starting a run of four weeks at the top), Fleetwood Mac, Motown Dance Party, Sade and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (with More Dirty Dancing at #6) and the next highest new entry was Run DMC (#13). I do feel we should give Nite Flite a bit more of a look because four weeks is an impressive run at the top - I took at the track listing and it's an impressive roster of artists doing some smooth R&B, but I don't recognise 80% of the tracks, so that's your lot!

Wikipedia doesn't have a lot on the album other than telling us its his fifteenth album and Andy Taylor, Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson (all in The Power Station at the time) were heavily involved in writing, performing and producing. I'm not going to check Rod's entry out because we've learned more than enough about him, but I did notice this album features the model Kelly Emberg on backing vocals - can you guess who she was in a relationship with around this time? Critically, the reviews were pretty average but there was a general acceptance it was better than his other recent efforts - Robert Christgau said it was all too Power Station-y for his liking, but that feels harsh to me. Commercially, his fans had long since given up caring what the critics said and it did well, particularly in Sweden where it got to #1, but it also got to #6 in Germany and even #20 in the US. 

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a couple of quid - somewhat surprisingly, the most expensive version available is a cassette version for £18.16. For me, there are just so many Rod albums that they have to be particularly good or particularly bad for me to specifically pay attention - and this album is neither of those things.

05/06/88 - Both perfectly fine and a crushing disappointment

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